White Flight from Immigration?: Attitudes to diversity and white residential choice

Kaufmann, Eric (2023) White Flight from Immigration?: Attitudes to diversity and white residential choice. Social Science Quarterly , ISSN 0038-4941.

Abstract

Work on white avoidance in the segregation literature finds that whites tend to move to less diverse neighbourhoods than minorities while whites who dislike diversity prefer less diverse neighbourhoods. Yet no analysis combines subjective data on ethnocentrism with analysis of migration behaviour. This paper bridges this gap with large-scale longitudinal data on White British movers, using Brexit support, voting and partisanship as proxies for beliefs about diversity. Results show that White British respondents move to less diverse neighbourhoods than minorities, even with controls for socioeconomic factors. Yet this appears only tangentially related to whites’ opposition to diversity. Pro- and anti-immigration whites choose whiter areas to move to than minorities, but do so at similar rates. We see something similar in geotagged American longitudinal Twitter data and in retrospective American mobility survey data. Overall, opposition to diversity accounts for little of the variation in why whites move toward less diverse neighbourhoods.

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